During the past several years, a substantial growth has occurred in the quantity and diversity of information and services available over the Internet. The number of Internet users has similarly grown rapidly. A predominant growth area on the Internet has been in the use of the World Wide Web, often referred to as WWW, W3, or simply “the Web.” The hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP) that serves as a foundation protocol for the Web has been widely adopted and implemented in numerous Web browsers and Web servers.
Web browsers provide a convenient user application for receiving textual and graphical information of individual Web pages in a scrollable display page format. The Web pages frequently allow a typical end-user to access a variety of educational, commercial, and retail Web sites through search boxes.
The emergence of electronic commerce, including online auction sites as well as fixed-price sites, has revolutionized the manner in which goods and services may be bought and sold. In particular, the development of network based commerce systems has enabled individuals to sell items with relatively little effort or expense while at the same time reaching a much larger potential pool of buyers than using more traditional means such as classified advertising and garage sales. In fact, an Internet enabled commerce site can extend well beyond geographical and cultural boundaries and potentially have a global reach. Consequently, one of the difficult challenges in developing a network based electronic commerce site is developing a site that allows sellers and buyers to communicate despite potential language barriers.
In a typical electronic commerce system, a seller posts an item for sale and describes the particular item in his or her native language. Unless a potential buyer can read and understand the seller's native language, the potential buyer will have no way of finding or understanding the seller's posting. Consequently, there is little if any chance that a potential buyer and a seller that have different native languages will ever enter into a transaction, or be presented with meaningful search results or listings in a native language.